Proceedings of the

7th International BOBCATSSS-Symposium

2S th - 27th January 1999
Bratislava
Slovak Republic

Learning Society
Learning Organisation
Lifelong Learning

Editors:
Sandra Beheim
Stephan Cradock
Eva Dachert
Sonja Pfurr

Vrana, Radovan; Badurina, Boris; Golub, Koraljka

Department of Information Sciences, Faculty of Philosophy
L Luia 3

10000 Zagreb
Croatia

Advantages and disadvantages of use of digital collections

in the process of education
Introduction
In last few years the Internet has become a true component part of the process of
education in many countries in Europe. This global computer network has brought
us many types of applications of computer technology suitable for learning.
However, there are still some methods and procedures which are part of this global
network and are still not sufficiently used. As a result of this opinion, a small group
of students of the 4 th year of library and information sciences at the Faculty of
Philosophy in Zagreb, proposed a project which, they think, would solve the problem
of inadequate quantity of printed exam materials at the Faculty necessary for the
successful completion of exams by use of a digital collection containing equivalent
ready-for-use material in electronic form.
Use of digital collections as a possible solution to the problem of inadequate
quantity of printed exam materials
As we are approaching the new millenium, we can look back and say that this last
decade has been characterized by the development of the new information sources
known as digital libraries, libraries without walls or virtual libraries. The foundation
of these new information sources is human knowledge organized according to some
principle in form of digital collections . These digital collections can be later used in
a local environment for various purposes (mostly for education) and eventually grow
in size and combine into larger c1usters of knowledge with other local collections
thus creating global network of knowledge. Furthermore, recent scientific works
agree upon the fact that the future of the knowledge organization will be in form of
highly organized structures of knowledge, based on indexed digital collections. On
the local level such knowledge-structures will share their resources by use of local
area networks, while on the global level they will probably use the Internet which has
already become a new paradi gm for interconnectivity among various information

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sources in the world today. As it is self-evident, during the last few years , the
explosive growth of the the Internet has given immense contribution to the
development of digital collections by giving opportunity to authors of such
collections to communicate and share their experiences with their colleagues around
the world thus creating another type of global network, network of experience and
specific problem solving knowledge applicable to the creation of future knowledge
structures.
When speaking about the Internet, one can' t avoid mentioning World Wide Web as
the most popular Internet service today. World Wide Web has come a long way since
its early days of the text-only content and is now ready for bigger tasks . The level of
maturity reached by Word Wide Web gives us a chance to incorporate this Internet
service in projects which need a medium for accessing organized information
resources on remote locations in easy and usually uniform manner. Local
information sources can then become more widely accepted and attract more
potential users accustomed to the graphical user interfaces of the most popular
browsers. This idea has gained its popularity mainly because of the well developed
software industry which understood properly potentials of the Internet both in
academic and in commercial domain. So called dumb terminals used by skilled
professionals are finally things of the past and can no longer threaten any user by
their inflexibility. Modem browsers with their functional and ergonomically built
graphic al user interfaces bridged the gap between the local information sources and
their limited acceptance (only) by local users and wider audience, helping people to
use large information sources on remote locations in simple and uniform way.
Byenumerating these well known facts we have tried to point out some issues and
trends which we think are important and are already present in the teaching process
at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and some other institutions in Croatia. Our
main idea is to give students at our Faculty at least equal opportunity to access and
use the Internet and World Wide Web in their everyday learning routine.
How important this can be showed us the survey conducted at the same Faculty last
year. This survey indicated rather small number of students using the Internet as the
preferred information source for their term papers or final exam at their respective
departments. Their number is slowly increasing at rate at which more and more
students have access to the Internet. Due to circumstances, students at the Faculty of
Philosophy in Zagreb have limited access to the Internet services. They can access
the Internet either in Faculty' s computer c1assroom which is to small to satisfy the
needs of all students at the Faculty or from their home PCs. The number of users in
both groups is indeed small and many of them still prefer using printed material over
the Internet for the preparation of their exams, but they are showing strong
inc1ination to learn more about computers in general and how to access the online
content prepared specially for them to help them in their education. This means that
there is a large number of future Internet users who explicitly asked for more
seminars, exercises and lectures dealing with computer literacy. To round up this

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thoughts, we can say that these are some of the ideas which contributed to the digital
collection project proposal.
Another big problem which is not directly related with the computer literacy but is
crucial for the success in the exam taking process is the quantity of the printed exam
materials. Again, the survey showed us that our public libraries, our national library
and some university libraries do not have enough printed material for all students
particularly during the period of exams. This major problem is already dealt with but
there is still much to be done to meet basic student' s needs for exam materials of
high quality and appropriate quantity. Possibility of loan or acquisition of articles
and books necessary for the successful completion of exams from libraries are rather
low due to the inadequate library funding, resulting in restrictions in acquisition of
new titles. One possible solution to this problem is of course to raise more money for
specific library collections or to propose a project which would bridge the gap
between students' demand and libraries' ability to answer that demand. We took the
second course with a hope to help the students of librarianship with specially
prepared digital collection which would serve as a possible substitute for non
existent printed material and would become new source of knowledge.
This assumptions lead us to the main part of this paper about the digital collection
project for the students of the library and information sciences. The basic idea for
this project came from a group of students of the 4th year at the Chair of librarianship
at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb: Koraljka Golub, Boris Badurina and Mihajlo
Zori who decided to build a digital collection of selected printed and electronic
materials necessary for the preparation of exams at the same Faculty. Under the
supervision of the assistant professor Tatjana Aparac, Ph. D. and research assistant
Radovan Vrana, this project came to light very quickly. The choice of a medium for
this project was very obvious, we chose the Internet as an ornnipresent environment
in which the project would eventually get its full acceptance. We all participated in
the last year' s survey and we all knew what we should do in order to make things
better and easier for the rest of the students population.
Project preparation and phases

Our project has two main phases and each phase has its key points.

Phase one:
collecting of the relevant information about similar projects in Croatia and in the
world
making of the project plan
collecting and selection of the printed and electronic material for the collection
digitization i.e. scanning and OeR

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 transformation of the OCRed material into WWW pages

transfer of the digitized material onto the Faculty' s WWW server
Second phase has slightly less key points but they are not less important than those
from the first phase:
solution to the copyright problem
obtainment of the additional disk space on server for the collection expansion
creation of the searchable index catalog for the collection
Although one can put some remarks on the choice of the key points in the both
phases, there is logical explanation to the each key point of this project. The most
obvious deficiency would be the omission of the copyright problem from the first
phase. During that first phase which is still in progress, we used printed and
electronic materials for which we had clear situation concerning the author' s rights .
This was possible because we had chosen specific exam materials written by our
professors and by people who gave their explicit permission for the use of their
material in our digital collection. If it would have been different we wouldn't use
their intellectual property to protect their rights from infringement.
When we were setting the main goal of this project, we had in mind solely students
of the librarianship at our Faculty and this determined the nature of our collection.
All participants were aware of the significant material quantity, so we decided to
digitize reading lists for the specific seminars first as our direction mark for the
future digitization process. This procedure gave us the exact number of articles
waiting to be transformed into the electronic form . Once we finished this phase, we
started with the process of digitization of the exam materials . At the very beginning
of the project, we knew that the main source for our collection will be articles in
various librarianship journals. We also wanted to digitize some books but then we
would have to deal with the copyright problem more extensively than planned, so we
decided to postpone it until the second phase of our project. We collected most of
the articles quite easily and didn't have any major problem except in situations when
all copies of the articles were already loaned.

Digitization
Generally speaking, there are three methods of digitization which we used in our
project:
digitization of the printed materials
transcribing of the printed or/and written materials
collecting materials already in the electronic form on disks, CDs etc.

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The choice of a method depends directly on the nature of a material which is to be

digitized or simply included in the collection if it is already in electronic form. Most
of the material included in this project were printed articles from various journals
from librarianship and informatIOn sciences. The articles contained mostly text or
text accompanied by illustrations or photos . When the process of article collection
was successfully completed, we selected the method of digitization suitable for each
piece of our future digital collection. During the collection creation process we used
the first method most frequently and of course we chose the two most popular
procedures: scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) . The analysis of the
usage of these two procedures has lead us to a new problem, the problem of speed.
This problem was closely related to the OCR and recognition of special symbols and
diacritic signs incorporated in the Croatian written language. Another big obstacle
was the slowness of proofreading after the OCR was finished, not to mention the
manual correction of errors. We also wanted to have a core literature digitized before
the main exam period starts, so the time component was crucial to the success of this
project. Nevertheless, we managed not to compromise the quality of the digitized
material. As a possible alternative to the OCR we thought of scanning of the printed
material and saving it to the Adobe Acrobat .pdf format but we didn't have
additional PCs with large disk arrays for temporary storage of large quantity of
scanned texts .
The second method - transcribing - was used only with the core material reading
lists, where quantity was not an issue. Each reading list contained only articles and
books references and this part of the job was quickly and easily finished without
major problems .
The third method was the most popular one because we received some materials in
electronic form which gave us some additional time to spend on scanning and OCR
of the printed materials. We expect that this method will eventually become
dominant as soon as we exhaust all sources of printed materials available to us . We
also expect authors to give us their work directly on computer disks in order to speed
up the process of the collection expansion in the future . This method requires only
small amount of time dedicated to the formatting of the text and possible conversion
of graphic material into the format appropriate for the World Wide Web.
Output format
One of the most important issues in this project was the question of the output
format once the scanning and OCR processes were completed. At the same time, this
is one of the biggest problems in the world of digital collections creation because of
the interoperability issue. In their development phases digital libraries had served to
local (academic) communities and had existed only in local environments, but in
time they outgrew that environments and tended to connect with other libraries of
similar nature. If their content is saved in different file formats those libraries will

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have difficult time exchanging their knowledge because they will loose too much
time on various types of format conversions. In this project, we concluded that it
would be best if we choose the output format right in the beginning of the project
thus avoiding the problem of interoperability once other university libraries decide to
use knowledge stored in our collection.
The format of our choice is Hypertext Markup Language or HTML. This is very
popular kind of language for content structure description which helped us to
structure the OCR output and store it as the plain text with HTML tags . A few years
earlier our choice would probably have been Standard Generalized Markup
Language or SGML, but today, it is HTML and our main reasons for this decision
can be described as :
simplicity of this markup language
short time necessary for the learning of this language
large number of available software tools for the creation and editing of documents
in HTML
possibility of expansion of the HTML core element set with new tags in the
future
availability of the most popular HTML browsers such as Netscape Communicator
or Internet Explorer.
Each of these points can be percepted as easy choice for someone without experience
in the document creation and exchange on the Internet but for others, the choice of
the file format is not an easy choice mainly because of the rapid expansion of the
Internet and its services. The Internet services are notorious for fast shape changing
and one cannot easily determine or decide on the file format in situation in which the
chosen format can become obsolete in few months time. HTML is now widely
accepted as the marku p language and users of digital libraries should benefit from its
use.
Simplicity of this markup language is another key argument for its application in our
project. There are some deficiencies in HTML but at the same time this markup
language offers a lot, especially when the time component is important and this leads
us to the new argument, one speaking about ease of learning of the HTML.
HTML can be indeed easily learned because of the numerous tutorials and software
applications written specially for this purpose. Students of the librarianship didn't
have any formal knowledge of HTML before they decided to propose the project but
they learned its basics very fast. In the future, Chair of librarianship plan to offer
some workshops in HTML in order to prepare more students for the participation in
similar projects or just to help them to find their way on World Wide Web. Of
course, there is always the possibility of learning HTML alone but this method has

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some significant drawbacks although knowledge acquired this way can be later
expanded through additional seminars and workshops or even projects like this one.
As it was mentioned before, there is a large number of software applications which
can be use in the creation of digital collections. The development of such software is
heading towards the more visual tools which do not require any specific or thorough
knowledge of HTML elements or tags. This could help us in the future if we decide
to ask for more students to participate in project.
Each collection document was coded with the basic HTML element set in order to
avoid problems related to the proprietary tags or elements introduced by Netscape or
Microsoft. This means that our digital collections can be easilyaccesses even with
the text mode browsers like lynx and of course with more advanced browsers such as
Netscape Communicator and Internet Explorer. Another key issue regarding the
design of pages was the uniformity or similarity. We wanted our documents in
collection to look more or less the same except in cases where it was necessary to
make changes which would alter the final design of pages due to some peculiarities
like graphics within pages etc.
As this project will move forward, we plan to use more advanced applications of
HTML like JavaScript but only when necessary. One such case will be our
evaluation survey written in HTML with additional browser windows created in
JavaScript in order not to compromise the collection structure and to point out its
flexibility for such tasks.
At the end, we plan to use all advanced features of the future HTML standards in
situations which will seem appropriate thus expanding our collection in such a way
in which our students could benefit best from it.

Copyright
Next important issue is related to copyright. From the very beginning of this project
we tried to make copyright central to all our efforts. Solving the problem of another
or/and repeated public manifestation of some author's intellectual property seemed
to us of utmost importance. We had clear vision what we want and how to do it. An
indication of the importance of this issue were situations in which we made
somebody familiar with our project, and this person always asked about copyright
and how we dealt with it.
Authors usually have fear for their work in electronic environment because
electronic works can be easily altered if they are not protected legally and physically
from the misuse. This peril isn ' t fictional at all and it should be treated with great
care. This project has strict guidelines concerning the copyright and we will try not
to compromise the results of our efforts.
In this special case (of our collection), we contacted all persons whose works were
enumerated on the reading lists and asked for their specific permission for the
inclusion of their works in our collection. Since this project is still in its early phase,

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we only had to contact our professors and people from the librarianship community
in Croatia. As our project will move forward, we will try to include some works of
foreign origin in our digital collection, accompanied by appropriate written
permissions for this incorporation if necessary. At the moment of writing of this
paper, not a single author whose work is already part of the collection has refused us ,
on the contrary, they were very eager to participate. We expect this trend to continue.
Access to the collection
As it was stated at the beginning of this paper, access to our digital collection of
exam materials is the key issue of the whole project and it reaches into the very
essence of the effort. Let us point out once again the fact that the goal of this project
is to give the students of librarianship at the Faculty of Philosophy ready for use
materials necessary for the successful preparation for their exams . We are hoping
that this collection will be also used by other students at Zagreb University, as well
as by students out of it, for instance, students of the newly formed Study of
librarianship at the Pedagogical Faculty in Osijek and by all other students and
scientists whose field of interest will be covered by materials from our digital
collection.
Having in mind various different applications of Information Technology (IT) in
education and inclination of our University in Zagreb for greater use of computers in
the process of education, it was decided that we should make this digital collection
public on the Internet, or to be precise, on the World Wide Web . The collection itself
is located at the main World Wide Web server at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb
which is an Digital Alpha server running Digital UNIX I OSF 1 operating system
and Netscape FastTrek WWW server. This server is well equipped with sufficient
disk space and with appropriate application software which is of great help in the
maintenance of the collection. Faculty of Philosophy is connected by the high speed
fiber optic ATM link (155 mbit/sec) to the rest of our Croatian Academic and
Research Network (CARNet) i.e. Internet. This kind of support guarantee us future
advancement of the project without glitches and problems . There were some
suspicions about inadequate amount of the disk space but this was quickly solved
and we do not expect such problems in the future .
Although our last year survey showed students' inclination towards the traditional
printed sources of knowledge and less towards the use of computers due to objective
reasons, we consider this state only temporary and we think that it is absolutely
essential to give our students pointers to use computer facilities and our Internet link
at the Faculty of Philosophy in greater extent and finally to show them advantages of
such electronic knowledge organization structures which will soon become as
ordinary for use as our libraries are today. Computer facilities at our Faculty include
one major access point and that is our computer classroom whose primary purpose is
support for the computer assisted learning (CAL). This computer classroom is very

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often used by students exclusively for their lectures and seminars which doesn' t
leave them much free time to explore the Internet on their own or to use computers
for the exam preparation and to become more self-reli ant when using computers
without supervision. This classroom is equipped with 20 new Pentium PCs
connected to the local area network and to a Windows NT server equipped with a
proxy server connected to the Internet. All PCs have installed necessary Internet
software such as Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer which enables
students to use all Internet services according to their needs. Such software
configuration eliminates some problems related to the problem of access of the large
number of people (students) to the Internet with different hardware and software
configurations. This will also help us later when we will evaluate effects and results
of our digital collection availability among students' population to eliminate the
factor of hardware and software diversity. This access point is almost ideal because
it provides equal opportunity for all students to access digital collection through
similar browser interface the way it was conceived in our project's plan.
Disadvantages of this access point can be summed up in inadequate number of
computers in comparison to the total number of students of all four years of the
study library and information sciences. In addition to these problems, we noticed the
lack of skill and knowledge in the Internet navigation among some students when
accessing electronic information sources.
Another way to access the digital collection is to use a PC and a modem from home.
It is very hard to evaluate this type of access to information resources because there
is no valid feedback. The user feedback could help us to plan further expansion of
the digital collection, improve the access to it and to determine optimum size of
material in the collection. Access from home implies different hardware and
software configurations which influence the user experience during the access to the
collection. If there is too much Java on web pages, or there is a large chunk of text to
download, there is always a possibility for user to give up retrieving text from such a
collection. In the end, we would like to measure both the students' access from home
and at the Faculty so we can get the exact picture of the collection usage.
Project costs

When speaking about digital libraries and the process of digitization, one almost
always has in mind project costs . From that point of view, our project is rather
unusual because we can' t present our expenses in such a way in which digitization
of an article page would cost 2 USD or equivalent in some other currency. This
project is not financed in any special way either by the Faculty of Philosophy or by
the Ministry of Science and Technology. Preparation and selection of material is
done at the Faculty but actual digitization is done at students' home due to lack of
appropriate equipment at the Faculty. We only use Faculty' s World Wide Web server

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in order to present our work and this is the only piece of equipment financed and
maintained by the Faculty.

Experiences and problems

This part of our paper is in direct connection with the its title since experiences and
problems we encountered describe advantages and disadvantages of the use of the
digital collection in the process of education. Current state of our project singled out
some advantages which can be further analyzed during the evaluation process:
greater accessibility of the exam materials in comparison to the printed materials
in our departmental library
choice of the output of the articles from our collection either in electronic or in
printed format
digital collection offer selected and quality material
student/user does not necessarily have to be at the Faculty to use the collection,
instead, they can use modems and work at home
there is no access restrictions, everyone (interested) can access the collection
work with the collection at hand can teach students how to be more independent
when using IT
Of course, there are always disadvantages to every project. We expect that more of
them will probably show up during the more intensive periods of the collection use,
but we will certainly try to solve all the problems and to improve all segments of the
collection. Some of the problems we have encountered are:
problems with the process of article collection, some journals were missing from
the library
problems with the OCR, some texts were damaged, letters were to small and there
was always a problem of manual error correction after the OCR
lack of the proper digitization equipment, at least one or two quality scanners are
required
small number of access points to the collection
only three students participating in the project

Evaluation
As this project is still in its development phase, it is not possible for us to make full
evaluation of its effects and results. However, if we consider the basic idea behind
this project, the one about making the core literature necessary for the preparation of
exams available to students on the Internet, we can conclude about some effects of

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our work. Students at the Chair of librarianship are partially introduced to the
collection through contacts with their professors or announcement on the Chair' s
bulletin board and announcement on the Chair' s World Wide Web homepage. The
project was initiated before the official exarn period in order to prepare core
literature for the exarns and to receive at least oral feedback from the students.
More thorough evaluation of this project' s results will be done by surveying the
students' population at the Faculty of Philosophy, especially students at the
Department of Information Sciences and Chair of librarianship. This survey will
probably be taken during the new academic year when students will be formally
introduced to the collection. It is expected that new generations will use the Internet
in greater extent and they will be probably more interested in reading of the material
in electronic form. Survey seems to be the best method of evaluation because it can
be taken during different periods of academic year and the results of these surveys
can be later compared to the initial feedback information at the very beginning of the
project i.e. now.
Another method of evaluation can be done in the online environment. We think that
the first introductory page of our collection will be the right place for a quick online
survey. The moment the student accesses the collection, he/she will be presented a
survey with several question crucial for the further development of the collection.
This type of survey will be taken by use of special browser window written in
JavaScript which will open during the access to the collection. It will contain
prepared questions and will close as soon as the student answers the questions. This
way we won' t compromise the structure of the collection and we will successfully
finish the evaluation.
The last method of evaluation includes monitoring of the WWW server log files.
This is very popular method in the world of information retrieval and can be also
used in our project. As soon as we announce to our new generation of students the
existence of our digital collection, we will start monitoring log files and ana1yzing
them in order to see which parts of the collection are most interesting to the students.
Conclusion
In this paper we tried to show one possible way of using information technology and
the Internet in the process of education at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.
Projects like this one, with students directly participating in them from the
beginning, shows us what direction in using information technology in education we
should take and what methods we should use. B y accepting digital collections as one
of their crucial information sources, students accept new technologies introduced to
them on everyday basis and also learn how to use the online content for their study.
If this project proves to be successful, and we think it will, in the future we will try
to attract more students to participate in similar projects, in order to create new

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digital collections as well as to expand the existing one according to the needs of all
students interested in such an information source.

References
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(12/6/1998) . 8 pp.

2. Faulhaber, Charles. Distance learning and Digital Libaries : Two Sides of a Single Coin.
http://www.carl-acrl.org/ Archive/Conference95/faulhaber.html. (1/5/1998) . 3 pp .
3. Fox, Edward A.; Hix, Deborah; NowelI, Dennis et al. Users, User Interfaces, and Objects :
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4. Fox, Edward A.; Marchionini, Gary. Toward a Worldwide Digital Library. Communications of the
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Sector. D-Lib Magazine. 6(1998). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june98/06ross.html. (15/6/1998) . 9 pp.

CVs:
Radovan Vrana: I was born in 1970. in Zagreb. I finished my primary and
secondary education in Zagreb and enrolled the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in
1989. I studied the English language and Information sciences and got my B.A.
degree in 1996. rm now working as a research assistant at the Department of
information sciences at the same faculty and preparing my M.Sc. thesis. Fields of
interests : library management, building of digital libraries.
Boris Badurina: I was born in 1974. in Zagreb. After I finished the High school for
electrical engineer I enrolled the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb where became a
student of sociology. In 1996. I enrolled the Chair of librarianship as a additional
study. In addition to being a student, I have a per time job in a library. Fields of
interest: surveying the public opinion, digital libraries.
Koraljka Golub: I was born in akovec in 1975. I finished my primary and
secondary school in akovec and in 1994 I came to Zagreb to study English
language and Information sciences at the Faculty of Philosophy. Now I have finished
my lectures and I have a few more exams to take. I am particularly interested in the
Internet and translation studies .

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